This analogy stood out to me as a very effective means to explain what the author is trying to get at. The idea that regardless of how bad something is, if everyone has it and I don't, the question isn't if I should have it, it's why don't I. It's used fairly effectively here to get the point across, specifically with the idea of food, which is so necessary to us. We could even go further to draw the connection between food and technology as now completely essential to our lives that who cares if it's contaminated or dangerous, we still need it.

“Silicon Valley’s model puts the onus on the user to decide if the bargain is fair,” Soltani told me recently. “It’s like selling you coffee and making it your job to decide if the coffee has lead in it.” When it comes to privacy, he said, “we have no baseline law that says you can’t put lead in coffee.”

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And the fourth concerns the idea of the adjacent possible. It just may be the case that biospheres on average keep expanding into the adjacent possible. By doing so they increase the diversity of what can happen next. It may be that biospheres, as a secular trend, maximize the rate of exploration of the adjacent possible.

For biospheres (as autonomous agents): expanding into the adjacent possible, at a maximized but secure rate, will put them in an advantage in evolution.

For an idea (in Popperian World 3): knowing its 'genes' and the boundary it operates within leads to the exploration of the adjacent possible. This is before it can start 'evolving' in the complex game of idea development.

Why would Shelley call Frankenstein the Modern Prometheus? After googling the myth, you can see the similarities. This analogy compares Dr. Frankenstein's ability to create new life from a corpse to Prometheus' ability to create man from clay.

can that drop truly understand the greatness of the ocean? can it understand it is a part of the ocean?
perhaps not but if it can understand itself, there is a chance it can understand what it's made of - the ocean

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Two monks were arguing about a flag. One said, “The flag is moving.” The othersaid, “The wind is moving.” The sixth patriarch, Zeno, happened to be passingby. He told them, “Not the wind, not the flag; mind is moving.”—Douglas R. Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach

How does quote fit the idea of knowledge commons. We are the individual monks and the commons is the mind moving? Not just your mind, not just my mind, but 'all mind'?

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A Forbes article points out that the age restrictions placed on NBA and NFL draftees is used to help the leagues, not the players.[13] The NBA and the NFL are able to use college as a their farm systems.

College coaches are receiving multi-million dollar salaries in this modern NCAA system. University of Texas Head Football Coach Mack Brown’s salary totals over $5 million. In comparison, scholarships for the entire Texas football team total just over $3 million.

Some writers, like Stanley Eitzen, have even compared the system to indentured servitude or a “plantation system.”[2] Concerning the revenue sports of men’s basketball and football, the players should be entitled to some monetary compensation for their work, as well as the right to enter the professional leagues at an age that suits their abilities.

comparing the system of players going to college before pros to indentured servitude or a plantation system / also uses testimony by getting someone else's opinion

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The mathematics of almost all eigenvalue problems encountered in wave physics is essentially the same, but the richest source of such problems is quantum mechanics, where the eigenvalues are the energies of stationary states ("levels"), rather than frequencies as in acoustics or optics, and the operator is the hamiltonian.

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that’s the strange thing about writing, which makes it truly analogous to painting. The painter’s products stand before us as if they were alive, but if you question them, they maintain a most majestic silence. It is the same with written words; they seem to talk to you as if they were intelligent, but if you ask them anything about what they say, from a desire to be instructed, they go on telling you just the same thing forever.